City of Thieves by David Bennioff, Audiobook narrated by Ron Perlman

City of Thieves by David Benioff

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A coming of age historical fiction set during the siege of Leningrad (late 1941). Lev, the young man (who we know lives through his ordeal because the story is framed as him telling the story as an oral history to his grandson), is arrested by the Russian NKVD for looting, but instead of being executed, he's teamed up with diserter Kolya to achieve what would seem to be impossible at that point in time: find one dozen eggs to be used for the Colonel's daughter's wedding cake. During their quest, they meet, work with and against the best and worst of a city trying to survive. Kolya is the eternal optimist, perhaps a too perfect of match for Lev's naive feeling of eternal doom. When a pretty young sharpshooter is introduced to the story, the focus of the story takes an unfortunate (but great for a Benioff screenplay) turn from survival to falling in love, but in the end, every thing's pretty much what you'd been expecting. There are no surprise twists, just a good, basic war time story.

As a narrator, Ron Perlman is an actor. What that means is that when he's doing dialog, it's an engrossing story. When he's reading actual narrative, his voice is flat and dull. That makes the beginning of the book very hard to get through, and it's what makes this a three star rather than a four star book.

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Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy, narrated by Richard Poe

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the second work of McCarthy's that I've listened to (as opposed to read) and it confirms what I suspected. McCarthy's stories are meant to be told. There is poetry in his words that is amplified by the human voice. Certainly, any of his books will move you if you read them, but listen to a good narrator (Richard Poe in this case, who annoyed me to stopping The Story of Edgar Sawtelle but seemed perfect for this book) and the story will pull you in as surely as if you were sitting in a room with McCarthy himself. Being immersed in this story can be a challenge, however, because it is extremely violent, dark, and at times down right unpleasant. But it is never gratuitous - the actions of The Boy and the Judge and the rest of the Glanton Gang are the people themselves. This is an epic of a downward spirally journey that will drag you down with it, if you're willing to go.

My only critisism of the story is there's a feeling of disjointedness. It's like McCarthy ran out of steam at one point, found a new track and then plunged back in. Events are described in painfully good detail, but then huge chunks of time pass with almost no narrative explaining what happened. It's a "wait a minute, did I miss something?" moment that passes quickly, but still, it's a break from a great story that you wish didn't happen.

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